A finished dissertation, a month of payroll, the only remaining copy of the books, and every bit of it depending on a small plastic object that caught the corner of a desk or gave up halfway through a transfer. Something this size travels well, which suits the geography. An envelope posted in Leicester, Wigston or Syston is on the Cambridge bench the next morning. Broken necks, dead controllers and folders deleted by accident all have a way back, and most of those ways start with the owner deciding not to try one more socket.
Every USB stick that arrives here is examined at no charge. The figure quoted afterwards is put in writing and settled before anybody reaches for a screwdriver: £250 + VAT on a USB stick, a pen drive or a memory card.
Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee. The named exceptions to it are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs; physical work takes 50% up front. The five bands are set out in full on the data recovery cost page.
Tracing a symptom back to the failure underneath it is where the real work begins, and these thirty account for all but a handful of the boxes opened at the Cambridge bench. A fault missing from the list is not an unfamiliar one — describe it on the telephone and you will get a straight view of the odds before you spend anything on postage.
The commonest arrival by a wide margin. A stick catches on a bag or a knee goes into the side of a laptop, and the plug takes the strain the board was never designed to carry. Where the four contact pads are still on the board this is a soldering job. Where the pads have lifted, the connection gets rebuilt at magnification.
The controller is not enumerating. That is the chip that speaks for the flash, and it failing says nothing about the flash itself. Reading the memory package directly bypasses the controller entirely, which is why a stick that no computer will acknowledge is still a reasonable prospect.
Windows can see a device and cannot recognise a file system on it. Your documents are still occupying the same blocks. Clicking format writes an empty structure over the front of them. Cancel, remove the stick, and let it be read at block level instead.
The best possible version of a bad morning. A deletion on a pen drive clears directory entries and leaves the contents in place, and unlike an internal SSD a plain pen drive is generally not trimming in the background. Provided nothing was copied on afterwards, these come back almost in full.
Heat with no enumeration usually means a short on the board, often a failed capacitor or a damaged regulator. Leaving it plugged in while it gets warm is actively harmful. It comes out, gets inspected under magnification, and the rail is repaired before anything is read.
That is an autorun infection carried from another Windows machine, not a hardware fault. The real folders are hidden rather than removed. The stick is read on an isolated bench and the contents come back clean, and it should not go back into whichever machine gave it that.
The controller has lost its translation table and fallen back on a default identity. On a pen drive that is one of the more ordinary faults and one of the more recoverable ones, because the flash behind the collapsed table has not changed at all.
Cheap sticks have a board that is barely thicker than a fingernail and they break where they are gripped. What decides the outcome is whether the fracture ran through the memory package or through empty board next to it. That is settled by looking, during the free assessment, not by guessing.
The firmware has been told to report a capacity the flash cannot hold. Copying appears to work, then the writes wrap round and start overwriting the earliest files without any warning. What can be returned is whatever genuinely fitted. The rest was never actually stored, and no laboratory can produce it.
More survivable than it sounds, provided nobody dries it on a radiator and then plugs it in. Corrosion carries on working under the casing. Send it wrapped, with a note saying it has been wet, and let it be cleaned properly before any current goes near it.
Crushing usually cracks the board rather than the memory package, because the package is the small hard block in the middle. Where the package is whole it comes off and is read on its own. Where the crack went through it, that is said honestly and the assessment costs you nothing.
This bench sees the same fortnight every year, twice over, once for each of Leicester's universities. The answer is nearly always yes, and the two things that turn it into no are running repair tools on the stick and saving new versions onto it after the fault appeared. Stop using it and get it in the post.
The document was still being written when the stick came out, so the last version is truncated. Older complete copies are frequently sitting in the unallocated space from previous saves, and application recovery files often survive alongside them. Both get looked for as a matter of course.
Enumeration is starting and failing partway through. Marginal power, a damaged data line or a controller in a bad state all produce that. Repeated plugging and unplugging does not improve the odds and occasionally finishes off a stick that would have read on a bench first time.
The controller is spending its time on error correction and block remapping. That means the flash is wearing out. Everything is still readable at that point, which makes it exactly the right moment to have the contents copied off, and the wrong moment to keep working from the stick.
Cheap flash is rated in the low thousands of write cycles and a stick that has been carrying a working file since 2019 has spent them. The failure shows up first as files that will not open and later as a device that will not mount. Both are worked from a raw read of the package.
Hardware-encrypted sticks and BitLocker To Go volumes are two different problems. Where a key or a password can be located the contents come back. Where a properly implemented cipher is holding the door and the key is genuinely lost, nobody opens it, and you get told that rather than sold an attempt.
Sticks written with disk imaging tools end up with a partition layout that Windows only partly understands, and one of those layouts frequently hides a data partition that is still complete. Reading the whole device rather than the partition Windows offers you is what finds it.
Reformatting to change the file system replaces the index and leaves the files in place until something writes over them. The recovery is carving by signature. What ruins it is copying a fresh set of files onto the newly formatted stick before anybody thinks to ask.
Marginal contacts, worn springs in a socket, or a stick with damage to one of its data lines. Whichever it is, the useful move is to copy everything off in the machine where it does work rather than to keep testing it in the ones where it does not.
The stick takes the weight of the lid and the plug levers against the board. It is a leverage fracture rather than a crush, and the damage sits where the connector meets the board. Straightforward rework in most cases, and one of the commoner reasons a stick arrives with a bent plug.
Some controllers switch permanently to read-only when the spare block pool is exhausted. That is a warning, not a disaster, because everything on the stick can still be read out in full. Copy it and retire it, rather than looking for the utility that promises to clear the flag.
Sticks used in industrial and office equipment often carry a file system the manufacturer invented, and a computer will report them as unformatted. The data is intact and structured, it simply is not FAT. It gets read raw and interpreted afterwards.
Flash cells leak charge over years, more so on a stick that saw heavy use before it was put away. Most of these read in full once error correction has done its work on the bench. Some come back partially. The one certainty is that another two years in the drawer will not help.
Say so when you book it in. Several popular tools write their own scratch files onto the device they are scanning, and knowing what was run and for how long decides the safest way to proceed. It rarely rules a recovery out, and it frequently changes the order of the work.
The less common of the two hardware faults and the harder one. Where a single package has gone on a multi-package stick, the interleave has to be reconstructed around the gap. Where a stick has only one package, the honest answer depends entirely on how much of that package still reads.
Small modern sticks are built as one moulded assembly with no separate memory chip. Access means grinding carefully down to the test pads and wiring onto them directly. It is chip-level work, so it takes 50% up front and sits outside no fix, no fee, and you are told before you commit.
One held the backup, one held the working copy, and the wrong one got formatted. Send them both and label which is which. The formatted one usually still holds most of what was on it, and having the pair means the newest good version of every file can be assembled from the two.
Pulling a stick out without ejecting leaves the file system half updated more often than the warnings suggest. Files written in the last few minutes are the casualties. Everything older is intact, and rebuilding the index from the data it points at is routine.
No light, no sound, nothing in Device Manager. Silence on a pen drive is ordinary and is usually the controller or the power rail rather than the memory. There is nothing mechanical to have worn out. The free assessment names the fault and puts one figure of 250 pounds + VAT against it.
The commonest arrival on this page by a wide margin is a stick with its connector bent sideways or torn off completely. A bag catches it, or a knee goes into the side of a laptop, or a lid gets closed on one that was left plugged in, and the plug takes a strain the board underneath was never built to carry. That looks final and it very rarely is. Where the four contact pads are still on the board it is a straightforward rework job under a microscope. Where the pads have lifted, the connection gets rebuilt track by track at magnification. Either way the memory package sitting in the middle of the stick, which is where your files actually are, has not been touched at all. The reason this matters is that a great many people throw a snapped stick away, or push it into one more socket in the hope that this time it will hold. Neither helps. Put it in an envelope with a note saying what happened, and let somebody with a rework bench look at it.
The second category is a stick that looks perfect and does nothing. No light, or a light that flashes and stops, and Windows announcing that the device is not recognised on every machine in the house. That is the controller, the small chip that speaks on the memory's behalf, and it failing says nothing whatever about the memory behind it. Most controller families have a diagnostic mode the manufacturer uses in production, and getting a stalled stick back onto the bus through it is the least invasive route available. Where that fails, the memory package comes off the board under controlled heat and is read directly, with the page order, interleave and error correction reproduced in software afterwards. Small modern sticks complicate that, because a good number of them are built as one moulded assembly with nothing separate to remove, and reaching those means grinding down to the test pads and wiring onto them by hand. Any pen drive is £250 + VAT, the same as a memory card, with the free assessment closing two working days after it is booked in. Chip-level work takes half up front and falls outside no fix, no fee, and you hear which category applies before agreeing to anything.
Almost everything on this page is a soldering problem or a firmware problem, and the bench reflects that. There is nothing to open under filtered air and nothing spinning to protect, so the work is fine rework, controller access, and reading memory packages that no longer have anything speaking for them.
Bent and torn USB plugs replaced, lifted pads rebuilt, cracked tracks bridged. A stick that snapped at the plug is one of the quickest jobs here and one of the most frequently written off by somebody else first.
Phison, SMI, Alcor, Chipsbank and Innostor controllers all have a production diagnostic path. Restoring a collapsed translation table through it returns the stick whole and readable, without anything having to come off the board.
Where the controller is beyond reviving, the memory package is removed under controlled heat, cleaned, and read directly. Chip-level work takes 50% up front and is one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee.
Small sticks with no separate package are ground down under magnification until the test points are exposed, then wired onto individually. Slow work with no shortcut, and the only route into that construction.
Raw flash is pages, spare areas and scattered metadata. Turning it back into files means reproducing the exact page order, interleave, XOR scheme and error correction the original controller applied, and that reconstruction is where most of the time on a chip-off job goes.
Every port has hardware blocking in front of it, and anything arriving with an autorun infection is worked on a machine with no network. Nothing your stick touches here is capable of writing back to it.
A pen drive is 250 pounds + VAT, the same as a memory card, and the free assessment that comes first closes two working days after the stick is booked in. Deletions, formats and damaged file systems are logical work and covered by no fix, no fee. A snapped connector rebuilt at the microscope is electronic work, and a memory package lifted off the board or a monolith ground down to its test pads is chip-level work, and both of those take 50% up front and fall outside the guarantee. You are told which category you are in before you agree to anything. The two habits that cost people their files are trying one more socket on one more machine, and letting a repair utility write its working files onto the stick it is meant to be scanning. Neither improves the odds, and stopping costs nothing.
The post office does most of the work of getting a job here. A drive that is already unwell travels better boxed and insured than rattling around a car for a day of errands, and something dropped into a Leicestershire postbox this afternoon is generally logged in at Cambridge tomorrow.
The general rule is the drive travels and the machine stays behind — out of the laptop, out of the tower, out of the iMac, out of the recorder under the counter. This bench does not dismantle equipment, and a repair shop will do it while you wait. Three things are the other way round, and getting them wrong costs you the recovery: an external drive stays sealed in its own case, a NAS comes as a complete unit, and a WD My Passport or My Book travels whole with its cable, because on those the encryption key is held on the bridge board rather than on the disk — separate the two and the data becomes unreadable even to us. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each labelled. The one thing nobody can work round is flash soldered onto the mainboard, as on Apple Silicon machines: if it will not come off, there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Cambridge Data Recovery. It is about seventy miles from Leicester if you fancy driving it — M1 south to Junction 19, then the A14 east — and the lab is two minutes off Junction 32 with parking at the door. Posting costs you a stamp and a day instead. Whichever you choose, you hear from us the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days after that.
Not certain what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it up, or let the free online diagnostic ask the questions for you.
Sticks announcing a size they never had, taken down to the chip
Cards that turned up bent, cracked or soaked, and go to the chip bench
Reformatted in-body, with every frame still sitting underneath the new index
Stop writing to it first; work out which problem it is afterwards
The examination is free, one written figure follows it, and the band covering this page is £250 + VAT on a USB stick, a pen drive or a memory card.